Scenes from the aftermath in Oakland:stories of victims, survivors and healers.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

After the death of Darnell Byrd, Jr, Part 1: between rumor and knowing

Between Rumor and Knowing

It always begins
with rumor and disbelief. Phones ring and it's the Street on the
line. The Street, notoriously unreliable, is saying your son has been
shot. But the Street always knows things before you do. Most often,
it is the last thing he touches, the last thing he feels, and as if
the concrete has sensed his last heartbeat, it begins broadcasting
the news.

Despite what early reports said, Darnell, 24, was shot once.

Ultra Humphries was
at work on a Saturday morning. On her way in that day she'd felt
compelled to pray for her children. Now she was in a meeting but her
cellphone kept lighting up and she kept ignoring it. She could see
who was calling: her daughter, her daughter's cousin, a family
friend. It was annoying; they all knew she was at work. Finally her
meeting was over so she called her daughter back. "Somebody says
Darnell's been shot," she said, "he's dead."

No, you're lying,
thought Ultra. Not that
her daughter was lying, but life was lying, the world, time was
lying.

Then came those long
hours between rumor and knowing, the last, strange, painful hours
between a normal life and the void, hours like a slow breaking of
your bones, as you search for the truth, for something solid, some
authority to tell you he is alive or dead. Sometimes the only real
authority is your own eyes.

It was only the
beginning of a journey similar to one thousands of Oaklanders have
taken in the last 40 years, as the city's homicide rate has remained
stubbornly high. There have been years when homicide numbers go down
and years when they rise to frightful highs, but the bottom line is
that for four decades Oakland, today a city of about 400,000 people,
has averaged 108 homicides per year, consistently one of the highest
homicide rates in the nation. Even as other troubled cities across
the country have brought violence down, Oakland has failed to do so.
Perhaps until now. We seem prepared to have our second consecutive year where homicides have fallen significantly, and we can only hope
that this trend continues, that it is in fact more than a trend, but
a new normal. It will take years and constant vigilance to know if we
have succeeded. It will take generations to bring real peace and
healing to our hardest hit neighborhoods, where children develop PTSD
from witnessing violence, from losing relatives and classmates to the
gun. Where many residents of all ages suffer in an ongoing way from
the trauma.

Ultra Humphries had
tried to escape that trauma, she had tried to shield her children
from it, raising them in Suisun, far to the east of Oakland. But,
eventually, Ultra, who'd grown up in Oakland, and her new husband,
Akim, had moved back. For a brief time they'd lived near crime-ridden
79th Avenue in East Oakland. Then the family had moved to a charming
old house on a quiet street far from 79th.

But something drew
Darnell back there. His mother had warned
him a way more than once.

"When you're in
an environment where you think that type of lifestyle is cool,"
says Ultra, "even though your immediate family doesn't do that,
you try to fit in"

But he had friends
and family over there. Then he got arrested there, for selling weed,
spent time at Santa Rita for that. Darnell was not one of those stoic
kids who pretends he's unaffected by incarceration..

"When my son
went to jail, he cried like a baby," Ultra says. "He wasn't
a bad kid, you're trying to be hard, but you're really not. He cried.
'I'm not gonna do this anymore, Mom, get me out of here.'"

Since then, things
had been going well for Darnell. His mom had worked hard to get him
into a program for young men, to help them find discipline and to
establish a path forward. Ultra worries that she did too much for her
son, was perhaps too protective, but really she just sounds like an
active and caring mother.

"I always came
to his rescue," she says. "That's why he probably thought
everything was so easy. Because I always came to his rescue. I'm
always doing things for him to make sure he's okay." Note the
present tense.

Darnell wanted to be
a barber. He had plans to begin looking and dressing in a more
professional manner. He and his mom were supposed to go shopping for
nice clothes, new shoes and button-down shirts that Saturday when she
got off work. On Friday night before a friend picked him up, Akim
asked Darnell if he'd be home later or if he was spending the night
with a friend.

"I liked to be
up and to let him in when he would get home," says Akim.

He remembers Darnell
thought about it a moment and said, Yes, he would be home that night.

Then a strange thing
happened, something that Ultra can't recall having happened before.
At 2 o'clock in the morning, she was awakened by a phone call.

"I don't even
know why I answered," she says. "I usually don't."

It was Darnell. Just
calling to say Hi. He was happy, excited, he'd only recently learned
that the family was planning a trip to Vegas for his 25th birthday that
coming January. He wanted to talk about it, wanted his mom to tell
his friend that it was true. He put the friend on the phone. Ultra
confirmed the story and told the friend to bring her son home, it was
so late.

In the morning
before heading to work she asked Akim if he'd let Darnell in, but
he'd not come home. They didn't think much about it. He was 24, he
sometimes didn't come home. Then, around 10 o'clock that morning, the
calls started coming in. As soon as she heard the rumor, Ultra
started looking for information. She called Darnell's friends, who
said he'd ended the night at an apartment near 79th.

"I tried to
keep him away from that area," says Ultra.

She tracked down the
number of a girl he'd been with that night, who said only that he had
been on the phone with someone, that he had been pacing the floor.
She called relatives who lived over near 79th. No one knew much.

She called the
coroner, but no one answered. It was a Saturday, the office was
short-staffed. Not until the end of the day did she finally talk to
someone there. They had a young man who fit her son's description,
down to a particular and unique tattoo. It was true. It was over. And
something else had begun.

Darnell was shot one
time in the head, at 6 o'clock in the morning, in front of a store on
78th. It was November and still dark out.

"Some people
tell me a lady near where he got shot heard him say 'Somebody help
me,'" Ultra tells me, then says it again, "Somebody help
me," but swallows the last word, or rather gasps it instead of
saying it.

Again she gathers
her strength and continues. "That's all I know that my son said,
he didn't have a gun, but he did call for help."

"If I looked
like my story, I'd probably be missing all my hair, all my teeth, one
leg, no hands, because I've been through a lot. I want them to know
even though I've been through the death of my son, you are still able
to make it, you can do it. And that's what Marilyn Harris has given me
strength to do."